In the 1950s, when I was 14, I spent a winter fortnight with my parents at the Villa Mauresque, which Somerset Maugham had lent to them to entertain the recently widowed Rab Butler and his daughter, Sarah. It was an uneasy holiday setting for two teenage girls. As I wrote a little apprehensively in my diary, ‘this house is lovely, but rather fragile,’ a concern which was borne out the next day when, during a pillow fight, I knocked over a full jug of orange juice with disastrous results for the immaculate upholstery. Never was a house more thoroughly permeated by the spirit of its absent owner, who looked down on us in melancholy reproach from the famous Graham Sutherland portrait on the wall. The regime ran with clockwork regularity. Every meal was served at a precisely pre-ordained moment and no dish on the menu could be repeated.
Maugham’s last years at the Villa Mauresque are vividly described by Selina Hastings in The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, where she tells how he became haunted by the Sutherland portrait with ‘its merciless vision … of an inexorably approaching and miserable old age.’ This sad final chapter is what many people remember about Somerset Maugham — his descent into senility, during which he did his best to disinherit his daughter and grandchildren, and wrote a deeply wounding personal memoir which caused pain and offence to many of those closest to him. Selina Hastings reminds us that he was a man of far greater stature than this would suggest. I am not sure that she is right in claiming that he was, ‘for much of his life … the most famous writer in the world,’ but he was certainly extremely widely admired and translated, and was familiar to millions who never read his work through the medium of film and television. It is also very unusual for an author to be equally proficient as a playwright, novelist and short- story writer. He was a consummate craftsman who honed his skills with Trollopian industry to satisfy the needs of his audience — needs which changed during his long career and to which he constantly adapted. A cultured man, he was well read in four languages, with interests and an experience of life far wider than that of most of his readers, yet he won and retained their allegiance through a masterly grasp of the basic skills of a writer of fiction — the ability to tell a good story and to describe real and convincing characters. Where he fell short of greatness, as is well illustrated in this book, is that his skills, as he admitted himself, were those of an observer rather than a creator. ‘I have small power of imagination … but an acute power of observation.’ Conrad wrote of Maugham’s dispassionate stance in his first play, Liza of Lambeth, ‘he just looks on,’ and that remained true throughout his life. He just looked on — and listened — as a young doctor, as a spy, as an adventurous and insatiable traveller, as a man about town. He would listen for hours to some fellow passenger on a tramp steamer or lonely tea planter, glad of an interested audience, until he detected that little bit of grit which his imagination could transform into a pearl in stories like ‘The Book Bag’, ‘Before the Party’ and ‘Rain’. He was none too scrupulous about abusing these confidences, sometimes not even bothering to change the victim’s name in the resulting story. This led to a storm of indignation after a particularly productive visit to Malaya, where he was accused, with some justification, of having ‘abused hospitality by ferreting out the family skeletons of his hosts and putting them into his books’. Most notorious of all was his merciless pillorying of his supposed friend Hugh Walpole as the ludicrous Alroy Kear in Cakes and Ale, a wanton act of cruelty, which even its undoubted brilliance could hardly justify.
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